Alan Jacobs

Explanation here

Collaboration … is not quite the same as open, unattributed, dynamically generated poetry. The question as we move forward is, can true, open source poetics be accomplished? Can a poem’s quality, beauty, value to its community be its most important features, rather than the famous name of its author?

I think the answer is yes, and to test that hypothesis I’ve registered wikipoetics.org. Nothing is there yet. My intention is to establish a truly collaborative workspace for poets and, in fact, anyone to participate in the creation of meaningful, culturally significant poems. Like Wikipedia, each entry–each poem–will have a title and a refereed method for registered users to edit/contribute. Occasionally, anthologies will be published as ebooks, available for download at a nominal cost. I’ve enlisted Patrick Herron at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Center to help build and promote wikipoetics.org.

Would anyone else like to contribute to the project? Consider this an open request.

Maps, [Tom Koch] cogently explains, “make arguments about disease, their pattern of incidence, and their method of diffusion. They are workbenches on which we craft our theories about the things that cause health to fail, imaging data collected in this or that disease outbreak. They are not, as some might argue, either mere representations of the world or simple illustrations of work completed in other media.”

During the great plague epidemics of the Middle Ages, for example, maps played a key role in the public health responses of the day including the quarantine. With the realization that the path of the Black Plague pandemic of 1347-1348 was identical to the human network of trade, the ruling government of Venice developed a way to impede that spread by halting the movement of goods and people into its port for a period of forty days, hence quarantine or quarantenaria. During the seventeenth century, cordon sanitaires were developed across Europe thanks to the practice of disease mapping. Borders of armed guards prevented potentially plague-ridden travelers from entering a specific area and sequestered regions were delineated to house those who were stricken with the disease. And while such an approach may sound terribly antiquated, if not outright cruel, modified versions of these “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now terms them, not only played a major role in attenuating the terrible influenza pandemic of 1918, they also helped save lives during the more recent H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009.

The idea that the Baby Boom generation, of all generations, would willingly hasten their own exit from this mortal coil in order to save someone else (their children, the government, future generations, etc.) from trouble and expense flies in the face of pretty much everything we know about that particular cohort’s habits and inclinations. This isn’t to say that there won’t be more support for assisted suicide as the original “Me” generation grows ever-less-gracefully old. But it will be a supplement, rather than a corrective, to the demand for ever-more-expensive medical interventions that Wolff’s article laments — a minor accompaniment to the major theme of life extension by any means and at any cost. There isn’t necessarily any deep conflict between the desire for any and every form of medical intervention when you still want to live and the desire for assisted suicide when you’ve given up the fight. Instead, the two desires intertwine somewhere deep within the modern psyche, because both spring from the same quest — for a perfect mastery over death, which aims for immortality but then eventually settles for the ability to choose the exact timing of our final exit.

When somebody says what sounds like “it’s only religion that keeps us from behaving like savages” I think: that person is afraid he will behave like a savage. And if he is turning to religion to save him from himself, he will find no salvation. He must first know himself, because only by that route can he allow himself to be saved (and I use “allow himself” deliberately; even if you don’t believe in God, and believe that all these dynamics are happening inside an individual person, there is such a thing as getting out of your own way). Religion may or may not help in that process; that, I think, varies between individuals. But there’s no short-cut. My text on this topic, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is Tolstoy’s short novel, Father Sergius….

Arguing that people “need” religion strikes me as an enormous waste of time. It will not convince anyone who really believes otherwise, and the people it does convince will have been convinced out of fear. And fear is a cancer; it is no stable ground for faith. The only thing – literally the only thing – to do if you care about your faith – including the faith that you don’t need God to be good, if that’s what you believe – is to live it, for its own sake. If you do that, you don’t need to do anything else. If you don’t do that, nothing else you do matters.

The more central claim—that stories increase our empathy, and “make societies work better by encouraging us to behave ethically”—seems too absurd even to argue with. Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they’d be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement. It is rare to see a thesis actually falsified as it is being articulated.

The various durations of government around the world are linked to the various durations and productivities of farming that was the prerequisite for the rise of governments. For example, Europe began to acquire highly productive agriculture 9,000 years ago and state government by at least 4,000 years ago, but subequatorial Africa acquired less productive agriculture only between 2,000 and 1,800 years ago and state government even more recently. Those historical differences prove to have huge effects on the modern distribution of wealth. Ola Olsson and Douglas Hibbs showed that, on average, nations in which agriculture arose many millennia ago—e.g., European nations—tend to be richer today than nations with a shorter history of agriculture (e.g., subequatorial African nations), and that this factor explains about half of all the modern national variation in wealth. Valerie Bockstette, Areendam Chanda, and Louis Putterman showed further that, if one compares countries that were equally poor fifty years ago (e.g., South Korea and Ghana), the countries with a long history of state government (e.g., South Korea) have on the average been getting rich faster than those with a short history (e.g., Ghana).

Last night I went on another mini-rant about the state of non-fiction on twitter. My complaint centers on a certain myopia I see in books of that genre. It seems non-fiction has become defined by one certain approach to it: the small thing that explains everything, or the quirky character who did some small yet significant thing. There are variations, but for the most part non-fiction writing that is transparently written and plot-driven reigns. I enjoy these books (I’m thinking of Michael Lewis, Susan Orlean, Mark Kurlansky, etc.) Another ilk is the “Big Think” book (Malcolm Gladwell, Nicholas Carr, etc.)

What these books are not, however, are particularly writerly. As a nonfiction writer myself, I do not want to spend the years it takes to write a good book on a project that does not also allow me to stretch my writing wings, be it on the level of the sentence, structure or theme. Can I be something other than explanatory? Can I deploy an organization other than beginning-middle-end? Can I play with language? These are the questions I want to answer yes to. But the market is not eager for projects like these.

There’s more than escapism going on here. Why do we seek out these hard places for our fantasy vacations? Because on some level, we recognize and claim those disasters as our own. We seek out hard places precisely because our lives are hard. When you read genre fiction, you leave behind the problems of reality — but only to re-encounter those problems in transfigured form, in an unfamiliar guise, one that helps you understand them more completely, and feel them more deeply. Genre fiction isn’t just generic pap. You don’t read it to escape your problems, you read it to find a new way to come to terms with them.

In November 2003, Skrbina mailed a letter to Kaczynski, then as now in a supermax prison in Colorado, asking those and other questions designed “to challenge him on his views, to press him.”

So began a correspondence that has spanned more than 150 letters and has led Skrbina to help compile a book of Kaczynski’s writings, called Technological Slavery, released in 2010. The book is a kind of complete works of this violent tech skeptic, including the original manifesto, letters to Skrbina answering the professor’s questions, and other essays written from the Unabomber’s prison cell.

Today, Skrbina is something like a friend to Kaczynski. And he’s more than that. The philosophy lecturer from Dearborn serves as the Unabomber’s intellectual sparring partner, a distributor of his writings to a private e-mail list of contacts, and at times even an advocate for his anti-tech message.